Barbara Boxer's first ad defining Carly Fiorina-- watch it if you haven't seen it yet-- was devastating for the failed business executive running for the Senate. Boxer's polling numbers started climbing from the day the ad was released. It was tough and stark and clear as a bell-- targeted exactly to what California voters are worrying about when they think of Republicans getting their hands on the levers of power again. Over the weekend, Boxer released another, obviously made by the same company, and even more powerful. Neither ad is playing footsie with these fascists.
"Oh, don't call them fascists," pantywaist hand-wringers and pearl clutchers whine. These are also the craven self-styled adults who bemoaned the "mean-spiritedness" of Markos' insightful and brilliant new book, American Taliban and Alan Grayson's stark ads about the religionist crackpot he's running against, Daniel "Taliban Dan" Webster, who the mass media has tried to paint as a mainstream conservative but who is actually far more radical and extreme than even Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, Ken Buck, Pat Toomey or Sharron Angle. (I left Joe Miller out for a reason and we'll get back to him shortly.) Friday night I went to the filming of Bill Maher's TV show because Markos was a guest. I was reluctant to go because Maher, the creator of the great documentary religionism takedown, Religulous, had made a craven, boneheaded remark about Grayson's Taliban Dan ad that showed a disturbing lack of comprehension and/or attention-- and on the part of someone who fancies himself a social commentator. I had a feeling he would also ambush Markos. And he did. It was completed obvious that the distracted Maher-- sexy girlfriend-- hadn't bothered to read Markos' well documented book he decided to savage.
Digby's kept a steady commentary up on these smelling salt users for some time and she hit it out of the ballpark yesterday.
Rand Paul, the pot smoking libertarian Tea Partier is now rending his garments like a typical social conservative Christian and condemning Jack Conway for being insensitive to his religion. (And once again the liberal intelligentsia is abandoning Conway because he's made an ad that they feel in "inappropriate.")
The fact is that Rand Paul, once a hardcore libertarian, condemned religion and certainly didn't believe in social conservatism. Tens of thousands of libertarians sent him money just this year believing that's the kind of Tea Partier he was. Now, like the rest of them he's changed his tune and he's become a Church Lady Bible thumper, excoriating Conway for saying the word "hell" at a political picnic. This is a bullshit game and Conway has every right to call him out as a hypocrite.
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/10/rand-paul-is-offended-joe-miller-is.html